Jerri Truhill, Famed Female Test Pilot Who Almost Became an Astronaut, Died in Irving on Monday

Had Jerri Truhill been born a quarter century later, she very well might have made it into space. Some argue she should have. She and the dozen other women who composed the Mercury 13 program passed whatever tests NASA threw at them, and she seemed to possess as much of the "right stuff" as John Glenn and the rest of the men who would be launched into orbit.

The early 1960s, however, were not a time of gender equality, so when Truhill passed away Monday at an Irving hospice, her story remained buried in the footnotes of the history of American spaceflight.

Truhill's first encounter with flight came at the age of 4, when her father brought her into the cockpit of flight he was taking to a business meeting.

"I said, 'I want to fly all the time,'" she told NPR in 2007. "And he said, 'Well, if you make real good grades and you grow up and you become a registered nurse, then you can be an air hostess.' And I said, 'Oh, no. That wasn't what I had in mind at all. I am going to fly planes.'"

She became business partners with, and later married, a fellow pilot named Joe Truhill. Together, they flew twin-engine B-25s for Texas Instruments and helped test the company's terrain-following radar, among other things, which mostly involved flying very fast at dangerously low altitudes.

That, says longtime friend David Adair, was par for the course for Truhill.

"She's like the Dale Earnhardt of the female air-racing world," he says. "She was an intimidator," tailing her opponents at the at the distance of a dining room table before zooming past.

In 1961, Truhill got a call from a friend named Jerrie Cobb, wondering if she was interested in participating in a top-secret government project. She was.

Truhill told NPR that she took the decision in stride, but others didn't, leading a Congressional committee to hold a special hearing on the subject in 1962 which, according to NASA's official history, foreshadowed later action to curb sex discrimination.

After the truncated astronaut training, Truhill and her husband bought a P-51 Mustang, which she used to fly around the country modeling a pink lycra flight suit for Monsanto. After that, she and her husband bought a house in Richardson, where she lived until her death.

"I think the biggest testament to her character was when her husband was imprisoned in South America and their aircraft confiscated (he was there legally), the State Department washed their hands of it," Hallonquist wrote in an email. "She put together the efforts on her own to get him home. She didn't go physically but managed to pull strings, push, cajole and finally get it done."